A look back at when Toronto was kind of filthy

Ever since the Walrus debate on Toronto's lack of beauty, I've been thinking about how much more polished the city looks today than it did 20 to 40 years ago. Part of this, no doubt, has to do with the degree to which the downtown core — which was once a sea of parking lots — has filled in, but there's another rather basic reason for this, too. Our buildings are simply much cleaner today than they were in the 1960 and 70s.

Toronto's industrial past doesn't tend to get a whole lot of attention, but had you lived here during the period in which these photographs were taken, signs of its presence would be pretty much everywhere in the sooty exteriors of the city's buildings. On an aesthetic level, this filth is anything but pretty, but there's also a certain rawness to these images that speaks to a time that was a little less tidy in general (you know, bad haircuts, hodgepodge signage, less corporate cleanliness). There's something almost compelling about it all, like photos of New York's SoHo in the 1970s, when the area was more than just a little rough around the edges.

On the flip side, photos like these make it somewhat easier to understand why it is that Toronto's city builders were so cavalier about knocking down heritage structures. Take City Hall for instance. When it was proposed to knock it down to make way for the new Eaton Centre (a complex that was to be much bigger than what we ended up with), the building was this nasty dark brown on account of soot accumulation over the years, a sign of neglect that helped foster the idea that it was worth replacing.

While it seems Toronto streets have always remained clean, various improvement and maintenance efforts in the 1980s and 90s would help bring the buildings up to par via the removal of much of this industrial residue — but not before a few were lost to the demolition process.

Discussion

34 Comments

To head off the inevitable question/comments regarding the roll that the photographs themselves have to do with the dirty-looking buildings, let's note that the underexposure of a few of these images certainly highlights the filthy factor – but even with a bit more light, the buildings are quite clearly marked by a level of soot that's uncommon these days.

Was is that slow of a day? To write about how old pictures of our city taken during the winter make our Toronto look drab?

People weren't dirtier in 1960 or 1970. The buildings the composed our downtown core were at this time already approaching 100 years old. Today it's all glass and concrete. To say that our city was dirty before is idiotic and feeds into poor preservation of our few, in blogto's definition "dirty", historical buildings that are left.

2. The arrival of greater supplies of
natural gas and the conversion from coal-
fired heating to natural gas heating systems.
When natural gas made greater inroads into
the city, the old hoppers of spent coal stopped
showing up on city sidewalks for collection.

3. The ending of apartment building incineration
systems. Once a day, the incinerator would
be fired up and all the garbage would go into
the system and the smoke emanating from these
buildings probably had quite a toxic soup of
fumes and smoke. Small apartment building
that converted to natural gas then had extra
space and, after a good scrubbing, could offer
a smaller apartment for rent.
------

I can clearly remember plumes of black smoke
emanating from almost every large building
in mid-winter until the time of the Trans-Canada
gas pipeline from Sarnia being brought into
the city and the old boiler rooms being changed
over into natural gas fired heating systems
or being connected to a local central heating
plant.

Co-incidentally, the increase of the natural
gas supply contributed to the closing of the
old Weston TB sanitarium. One of my former
classmates in 1959 at Humberside had to leave
school and go to the Weston "san". Her family
had come from East Germany.

i love that the signage (public + private) and advertising is minimal - it actually allows you to see the city/buildings.
I would argue that the city is dirtier today due to all of the visual pollution.

You completely missed the point of this article. Did you not notice that the stone was completely discoloured due to neglect in all of these photos? This was the result of the 1950's-60's,70's disdain for historic buildings and probably led to their tragic demise in many cases, (let's get rid of those eyesores)when in fact all they really needed was a good scrub.

We are so self-obsessed today with FoodTV style presentation, HGTV style design, bland glass condos, brainwashing of corportized design and signs everywhere. This is where we came from, and who we are today.

A time when we were forced to live 'Out there' instead of in a electronic world and our iphones.

Hmm yes, I enjoy not bathing for weeks on end becuase I believe it gives me character. Anyone who enjoys seeing buildings as they were meant to be seen and not covered in decades or centuries of filth and grime is obviously an uncultured fool who doesn't appreciate squalor.

The air from the 50s and 60s was sometimes hard to breathe. I often think of how we hated to follow a bus in traffic or get stuck behind a big truck because the exhaust came out in big black clouds and made you gasp for air. No wonder the buildings had a coat of sooty dirt. Also, the air in the subway trains was often the same. Our air is definitely much cleaner now.

It's a nice reminder of how polluted Toronto once was. Ironic that the cars are so much cleaner and the Lakeview and Heart generating stations and the Ashbrides Bay incinerator are now closed but we aren't happy with the cleaner air.